Watching the Watchers: Enemy Combatants in the Internment Shadow

In the past, the government has avoided accountability for the atrocity of allowing the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Kang examines whether the federal judiciary is again shying away from its responsibilities of holding the other branches accountable for their actions as they conduct their war on terror

What Judges Can Do About Implicit Bias

“Implicit bias” was not well known in legal communities twenty years ago. But now, the idea of implicit bias circulates widely in both popular and academic discussions. Even the casually interested judge knows a great deal about the topic. Still, even as the problem of implicit bias has grown familiar, potential solutions remain out of focus. Specifically, what can judges do about implicit bias, in their capacities as managers of a workplace, as well as vessels of state power? In 2009 I wrote a Primer for the National Center for State Courts, which described the challenge of implicit bias to judicial audiences.1 In 2012, I was the lead author of a more systematic examination titled Implicit Bias in the Courtroom.2 That author team included not only legal scholars but also psychology professors such as the inventor of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), as well as a sitting federal judge. Together, we described the then-state-of-the-art and recommended potential countermeasures. The goal of this article, nearly a decade later, is to update the scientific understanding since 2012. It also revises, reorganizes, and streamlines recommendations for judges who believe that implicit bias is a genuine problem but don’t know what to do about it.3 To keep length manageable, it focuses on the challenge of implicit biases held by judges themselves and does not directly address the biases held by others, such as police officers, probation officers, prosecutors, and jurors. It also focuses mostly on individual-level responses that judges can take themselves although institutional-level reforms may be what’s most important

Fair Measures: A Behavioral Realist Revision of "Affirmative Action"

New facts recently discovered in the mind and behavioral sciences have the potential to transform both lay and expert conceptions of affirmative action. Drawing on recent findings in implicit social cognition (ISC) and applying a legal methodology called behavioral realism, the authors advance four arguments. First, evidence of pervasive implicit bias allows us to avoid problematic backward- and forward-looking justifications for affirmative action and instead focus on addressing discrimination here and now. Second, evidence of biased interpretation and stereotype threat suggests that merit is currently being mismeasured, and that more accurate measurement processes should be adopted. Third, evidence of the malleability of implicit bias suggests interventions different from the traditional social contact hypothesis, such as deploying debiasing agents. Finally, instead of an arbitrary deadline, a better terminus for various affirmative action programs is when our society reaches alignment between explicit normative commitments and measures of implicit bias. Through this analysis of the legal and policy implications of cutting-edge social cognitive research, the authors shed the freighted term affirmative action and produce instead a scientific and normative common ground in favor of fair measures.Psycholog

Tuning the Photocycle Kinetics of Bacteriorhodopsin in Lipid Nanodiscs

AbstractMonodisperse lipid nanodiscs are particularly suitable for characterizing membrane protein in near-native environment. To study the lipid-composition dependence of photocycle kinetics of bacteriorhodopsin (bR), transient absorption spectroscopy was utilized to monitor the evolution of the photocycle intermediates of bR reconstituted in nanodiscs composed of different ratios of the zwitterionic lipid (DMPC, dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine; DOPC, dioleoyl phosphatidylcholine) to the negatively charged lipid (DOPG, dioleoyl phosphatidylglycerol; DMPG, dimyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol). The characterization of ion-exchange chromatography showed that the negative surface charge of nanodiscs increased as the content of DOPG or DMPG was increased. The steady-state absorption contours of the light-adapted monomeric bR in nanodiscs composed of different lipid ratios exhibited highly similar absorption features of the retinal moiety at 560 nm, referring to the conservation of the tertiary structure of bR in nanodiscs of different lipid compositions. In addition, transient absorption contours showed that the photocycle kinetics of bR was significantly retarded and the transient populations of intermediates N and O were decreased as the content of DMPG or DOPG was reduced. This observation could be attributed to the negatively charged lipid heads of DMPG and DOPG, exhibiting similar proton relay capability as the native phosphatidylglycerol (PG) analog lipids in the purple membrane. In this work, we not only demonstrated the usefulness of nanodiscs as a membrane-mimicking system, but also showed that the surrounding lipids play a crucial role in altering the biological functions, e.g., the ion translocation kinetics of the transmembrane proteins